The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (26 page)

So much I remember: the baby riding high and large under the bone until I thought that I might split, not in pain but, as a fruit might, in pleasure at the ripeness of itself. The head came. He turned into the world like a screw twisting out of me, and his nose looked quite large. I thought this while the rest of him was still inside me, and the timing of it seemed so odd or unworthy that I laughed, and the laugh pushed his shoulders out and the rest slopped clear. And he drew breath.

A boy. I knew it. I will call him Juan Francisco, for his father. And I will sweeten it to ‘Pancho’, for me.

His own cry seemed to astonish him – or so I thought. But I am already too fond. And then, sometime later, my Love was there. He took the boy by the neck, twining his fingers around the tiny bones of his ankles, and raised him high over his head, offering him, it seemed, to the ceiling, or the window, or the street below. And, as he did so, he shouted. He roared. This all to Miltón’s great irritation, who bustled over and scolded like a woman. López handing over the baby then; almost slinging it at the matron who had attended me, whose name I now know to be Juana Pesoa.

And then later he is in the crook of my arm. They say you must love a child – but not too much! They say you must do this, or that. But a word like ‘love’ means nothing to us. It is not even a feeling I have for him, or he for me. It is a silence, or very like a silence. It is the inside shape of
me
– and it is the outside shape of him. It is nothing that you could stick a word between.

And now I fret at the way his father lifted my boy, as though daring fate: the ghosts or gods of this place. Though I know that we make our own lives. Who knows it better than I, having made my life at last – with this journey, this man. A woman’s crowning achievement, Miss Miller used to call it. Well look at me now. I have a child that will never know hunger, and more than that, Miss Miller, I have had a child who will always be rich. And even as I look at his ugly, tiny face, I wonder at it: how careful – through all my mistakes – how very careful I have been.

The only peculiar thing about all of this being that when I look for the house, some weeks later, in order to find the woman and thank her (perhaps the one friend I will have in this place), I keep missing it. I ask for, and am directed to, the house of Juana Pesoa, but I drive my little phaeton around one corner and the next. This happens so often I have a boy lead the horse by the bridle to the door, but the house we stop at has just one storey, when the house I gave birth in had two. Or so I remember. When the curtain ripped in my hand I was standing at a window looking down into the street. There were people going about their business, down there, unawares. But this house has blank walls, a fancy wooden grille over the one window, which faces, across a lane-way, another wall.

When I knock at the door, it is indeed opened by the servant of Juana Pesoa. To still my agitation the mistress of the house shows me the room where Pancho was born. There is a window on to the courtyard and, hanging in the dusty light, the curtain still torn.

‘I thought I was high up,’ I say. ‘I thought I was on the first floor.’ And she looks at me.

Clean Linen

March 1870, Cerro Corá

IT WAS NECESSARY
was to bury him before he began to rot. He was very fat, still. His eyes were neither shut nor open: there was a bland rind of white under the lids, which seemed, in their gentle curves, like two little smiles. Eliza walked the length of his body, from head to toe. Death made him smaller: she was brought short by reaching the end of him. She stopped, then turned and walked back up to his head. She toured the length of him in this way, once, twice more; and when a young Brazilian captain came over she pushed him away from her and did not break her stride.

She halted at the midsection, and looked at him. López lay as he had been dragged out of the river; his toes pointing gracefully down and his arms by his side. The water had mixed with the blood of his wound, leaving tidemarks on his shirt; the last piece of clean linen in Paraguay. It made it look as if he had died, not of a bullet but of some small, domestic indignity. It looked as though he had died of a stain.

Eliza nudged a pale arm away from his side; then she drew her foot back and kicked him in the ribs. The last air rattled out of him with a flabby sound and, as though
frightened
by it, she kicked him again, quickly, in the neck. Then she walked back to his feet. On the next turnabout she kicked him in the head and his skull was so heavy and hard she seemed to hurt her foot. The head spun away, then lolled back, while she lifted her toe behind her and dabbed it in the air. His eyes rolled fully open on the return; you could see them stare, as though to protest the kick to the blades of grass that grew unseen, close to his dead eyeball.

By this time, the men were gathered at the edge of the trees, to look. No one moved. The Brazilian general, Camarrá, had a contingent ready to set around her, because the Paraguayan women had started to wail the death of López. It was a foiled, pathetic cry, as though they might as soon tear the body apart as bury it. And, if they could not kill him, because he was already dead, then they might settle for killing her.

Eliza listened. She bent from the waist and took something out of the corpse’s boot. It was a knife, but instead of lifting it and lowering it into her own heart, she crouched and slammed it into the ground, just there, where his eyes were fixed on the blades of grass. She talked to him in English as she dug, so that no one would approach. You could hear the metal eating the earth and the hard-sounding phrases as she spoke. Sometimes, too, little whispers in French, which was the language they used when they were alone. She paused now and then, and sat back, because the knife was small and her hands were small, and the hole she had in her mind’s eye would not be emptied of earth until it was night.

She cried for a while in the middle of the afternoon and scrabbled faster, scooping the dry red earth with her bare hands up and away to form a shallow bowl, which might, when you looked at it, be enough to keep the wild animals off. Then she stood, and organised herself. She brushed her
skirt
and pulled each sleeve down to the wrist. She tucked a stray lock behind her ear, then felt around the back of her head and freed the mass of her hair. The stuff fell down behind her, and she shook it out and swung it to one side, before gathering it to be wound into some mysterious knot. It was so deftly done; her hands moving, once, twice. Then one hand held the pile, while the other reached for the pin that had appeared somehow between her teeth, as though she had coughed it up.

She glanced at the crowd. She walked around the body of Francisco López so that it lay between her and the grave she had made for it. Then she bent down again and started to push, then roll him in.

And so it was nearly done.

Stewart looked around the camp they had set the night before, now smashed and overrun. They were in a wide valley, a high bowl in the mountains – the Cerro Corá. A man with a pack mule had told them the name of the place, and then he walked on. They had let him go – as though this was not a war, with the imperatives of war, but simply a road they were on, where a man might travel the opposite way.

López was losing his touch – he who understood more than anyone what a war demands: that you must shoot your own brother, you must shoot your brothers-in-law. You must make your mother swear that you are the only legitimate child of your father Carlos Antonio, the previous Dictator López. You must whip one story out of a man’s back and then whip a different story out of his front. You must always change the details or, if the details remain, you must change the conclusions. You must make the facts of the matter shift and wriggle, so that when the time comes, there is nothing real for the enemy to kill.

But the man went by, alive, and his valuable mule was
let
go with him, and he walked until he found the Brazilian army, and he led it back to where they were, like pulling a toy on a string. And so it was that the man who betrayed López, in the end, was the one to whom he had been most indifferently kind.

They debouched into the valley from two sides, hidden by the folds in the mountains; and, without stopping or regrouping, without a strategy of any kind, they ran towards the Paraguayan camp. Perhaps it was apparent that they did not need a strategy, and this last discourtesy made Stewart look about him at the fleeing, scrabbling crowd, who picked up what they could by way of food or children and ran towards the stream of Aquidabánmi. Perhaps ‘crowd’ was too big a word for them now. They were a travelling show, an eviction, a village wandering from some clearance. They were people who had no lives left to lose.

Despite which, the Brazilians were upon them like a band of grinning robbers, whistling to each other and whirling weapons over their heads; blades and lances – it was too close for shooting, and too scattered for much close work. A man, galloping low and hard, scooped off a man’s head with his sabre, and was cheered as though for some trick, as the surprised neck shot its exclamation of blood in the air.

A stumbling man turned to shoot Stewart, and he had the face of a middle-aged boy. There was some disease that did that to you, Stewart thought, as the pubescent old man lifted his rifle to his shoulder – now, what was it called? The shouted gutturals of his Portuguese sounded, at this close range, like something twisted, perhaps evil; like Spanish gone askew. Stewart thought how foreign it sounded. Then he remembered that he was British, so all languages were foreign, really. Finally he realised that if he was British then there was no reason to kill him, because this wasn’t, strictly speaking, his war.

With sudden conviction he lifted up, for the wizened child’s attention, an empty bottle of turpentine in one hand and a Smellie obstetrical forceps in the other; both snatched from his open bag. The child looked at them and stumbled onwards, his legs still going crosswise in their fatal dressage. The rifle lingered on Stewart’s face, the angle became more acute, and then it slipped away – at which precise moment, the boy pulled the trigger and, still shouting, swung the muzzle around, and ran on.

Stewart looked at the forceps. It was shaped like giant scissors. Each leg was a loop of metal ribbon which was shaped to fit the soft contours of a baby’s head. Perhaps the loops were intended to fit around the baby’s ears. Stewart was not entirely sure. He had brought the forceps with him from Britain in order to deliver Pancho, the first son of Eliza Lynch. It was the last thing he had about him of ‘William Stewart, physician-accoucheur’, and he was amazed that it had survived all this time: it had not been whittled down for cutting or stabbing, nor had it been chopped up for shot. Stewart used it, mostly, for cooking – it was handy when you wanted to extract something, or turn it over in the campfire. But there was something, evidently, in this set of blackened tongs that meant that he was either a doctor, or too mad to kill, because the Brazilians rode past him now, as he gazed at the forceps that had delivered him his own life. And, by the time it had happened, by the time it was known – whatever knowledge that rushes through a battlefield so fast that fighting men look at each other, and falter, and stop. By the time it was over – which was very soon. Stewart found himself standing in a meadow, alive.

The work that had been done was the shooting of Francisco Solano López. There were few enough rounds fired, and Stewart thought he might have heard the particular shot echoing around the bowl of the hills, long after it had hit the man’s escaping back.

One soldier claimed he had seen it, as they stood, and then sat, in the shadow of the trees to watch Eliza Lynch. He said it happened in the middle of the stream. The horse had fought to get out from under him as Il Mariscal jerked bolt upright – almost surprised – and then pitched forward on to the animal’s neck. The man said the horse was having none of it, and upped López into the stream, where he thrashed a little before the bubbles came. So it was the horse that killed him as much as any Brazilian, he said. Another few feet and he might have made it, he might be gone clear, or he might be captured and sitting here with them now. The thought amazed them all so much they fell silent, and looked to where the man lay to check that he was still dead.

A few crossed themselves.

Another man said that the horse knew it was time. The thing they hate, the thing they fear most, he said, is to crush a man. And worse than that to have a dead man on their backs. He said, too, that López loved that horse. All horses, he said, after a while. He said that López loved every horse he ever rode. And that the horses repaid that love. Or usually they did.

Stewart wanted to walk away from this, but he could not, corralled as they were under Brazilian eyes.

‘Doctor,’ he said again to the sentry. ‘
Inglese. Inglese
.’ But the man was nervous of him – the sandy red hair, he supposed; the fact that his face had peeled and crusted so badly in the last, long months in the sun. He did look rather like a disease, and a foreign one at that. And so he grinned, in a winning sort of way, and went back to the men.

They sat and were obliged to watch Eliza, as though in expiation of all their crimes, as she rolled the body, first one end and then the other, towards the hole. The legs of Francisco Solano López went in first and then, very
slowly
, the rest of him followed, turning as it went, so that his face surfaced one last time before disappearing into the ground.

Then she stood – as though, Stewart thought, to show them all the state of her dress. ‘Look what you have done to my mousseline,’ her hands might have said. She swept them downwards in a tragic dumbshow that might also have meant, ‘May God have pity on women. The things that fall out of us that we can never pick up.’

She walked over to where Pancho lay and knelt beside him. And still no one dared to help her as she pushed one arm under her son’s knees and the other under the small of his back. She tried to gather him up like this, as you might lift a sick child, but she could not. His stiffening body came up at the legs in a kind of comical kick, which forced the torso back down. Eliza dropped one leg and then the other, and then tried again. She started this time with a hand under the small of his back, then she reached for the knees, but the span of her arms was not enough to compass the length of her dead son, and she ended up circling his torso with both arms and, half-dragging, half carrying him, on her knees to the grave.